Walks in Rome

In F.T. Prince's new poem a visit to Rome brings back memories of fifty years ago, today's graffiti contrasting with Mussolini's slogans. Things seen, a plaque for Stendhal or a chapel with paintings by Caravaggio, are used to suggest young and older experience. What David Gascoyne described as Prince's 'memorable, quite personal peculiarity of phrasing' and his 'fresh clarity of vision' are in evidence throughout this poem, his first publication since "Later On".

F.T. Prince was born in South Africa in 1912. He was educated there and at Oxford and Princeton Universities. During the war he served in Army Intelligence at Bletchley Park and in the Middle East. From 1954 to 1974 he was Professor of English at Southampton University. He has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls, Oxford, and in 1973 he gave the Clark lectures at Cambridge. More recently he has been in Jamaica as Professor of English at the University of the West Indies, and at Brandeis University in the USA and Sana'a University in the Yemen Arab Republic as Visiting Professor.